söndag 25 april 2010

Experimental Non-Support of CO2 Global Warming Effect

If you are a responsible parent, you are supposed to tell your kids that the Earth is kept warm partly by the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere absorbing and emitting/backradiating heat which otherwise would get lost into outer space.

Since kids are not convinced easily by theoretical arguments based on Stefan-Boltzmann's Law of Radiation usually presented as the scientific basis of this "greenhouse effect", you are supposed to point to an experiment with a bottle of water being warmed more by a lamp if a tiny bit of CO2 is added to the water, as shown above.

So you say to your kids: See, CO2 absorbs radiation and heats the water in the bottle and similarly the Earth is kept warm by a small fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere. The same argument has convinced scientific academies about the threat of global warming from CO2.

But if you are a really responsible parent, you could ask if the experiment is relevant. You might say to yourself: What really matters is the insulating effect of the atmosphere, which is what keeps the Earth surface at 15 C and not the 0 C without atmosphere.

You might say to yourself: Insulation cannot come from radiative absorption/emission, and the experiment has nothing to do with insulation, only radiative absorption, and so it is irrelevant Penguin Logic.

If anything, increasing radiative absorption/emission would decrease insulation, and thus more CO2 would rather cause global cooling than global warming!

So you may say to your kids: The CO2 bottle experiment does not show what it is supposed to show, namely global warming.

Are there other experiments you could point to? Not, as far as I know. And science without empirical basis is not science. For more critique of greenhouse theory, see the Hockey Schtick list.

Accordingly IPCC very cleverly claims that the atmosphere greenhouse effect results from a "different physical process", because the atmosphere obviously does not block convection.

But IPCC gives no clue to what the "different physical process" could be, other than trapping infrared radiation, disproved in 1909.

Notice the clever Penguin Logic: Since a conventional greenhouse works by blocking convection and not radiation, IPCC states that the atmosphere greenhouse effect comes from "a different physical process", that is different from convection (because the atmosphere does not block convection). The Penguin Logic is then completed by stating that the atmosphere greenhouse effect is precisely the effect not used by a conventional greenhouse, that is trapping radiation. Undeniably, trapping radiation is is different from blocking convection, and the loop of Penguin Logic is closed!

Here is another rough estimate of climate sensitivity as a variant to those discussed in previous posts: A fully transparent atmosphere without convection-conduction would according to Stefan-Boltzmann give an Earth surface temperature of 0 C (which is Arctic Summer temperature). A non-transparent atmosphere (like in the tropics) with convection-evaporation-condensation, gives an observed tropical temperaure of 27 C. Note that without convection..., the tropical temperature would be o C, and so convection... is very important.

The real case is somewhere in between the above extremes, thus with a temperature span of 27 C. A 1% change of the atmosphere properties (radiation-convection...) can be estimated to give a 1% change of 27 C, that is 0.27 C. This argument thus gives a climate sensitivity of less than 0.3 C, one tenth of the IPCC alarm of 3 C.